Kour Pour

The British-Iranian artist finds fresh inspiration in the ancient.

One of Kour Pour’s earliest memories is playing on a Persian carpet in his childhood home in Exeter, England. Later, at Otis College of Art and Design, Pour, 26, began making hyperrealistic paintings of carpets that he found in catalogs. “They started from a personal place,” says Pour, who is British-Iranian and lives in Los Angeles. “But they’ve grown into something else.” His first New York solo exhibition, a suite of seven intricately detailed eight-foot-tall canvases, at Untitled gallery earlier this year, sold out before the show even opened. The sudden market demand, Pour says, only plays into the themes in his work. “The narratives depicted in these carpets are often about commerce on the Silk Road,” he explains. Pour plans to start creating his own carpet designs for upcoming shows at Ellis King gallery in Dublin this fall and the Mistake Room in Los Angeles in 2015. His source material? The Internet—though he won’t search for anything made after the Victorian era. “The images are old, ancient even. But the way they’re all gathered from different places speaks to our world today.”